R+P Post 13: Our Animatic

The third stage of pre-production, following the timeline and storyboard was to create an animatic. This involved us going around school and finding similar settings and props to what we would use in the final shoot and then taking still photos of each scene pictured on our storyboard, using ourselves as stand in actors.

As a group we then edited the shots to the length we had them on the timeline and then put the soundtrack behind the entire thing as well as putting in any sound effects behind any specific shots.

Animatic editing schedule

The animatic is a popular form of storyboard in the professional film industry as it brings the storyboard to life and allows you to get a better idea of what your film opening will look like and if it will turn out how you intend it to. For these reasons, we chose to spend some extra time creating one.

The animatic highlighted several issues with our preliminary idea which we then resolved afterwards. It highlighted the amateur and unconvincing nature of our news anchor setup which we resolved by changing the setting and dressing the set better i.e. with a laptop and news notes. It also brought light to the issue of our news dialogue as it was clearly not authentic and therefore would not be believable to the audience. This prompted us to do some extra research into similar news broadcasts and revise the script in a similar style to the news reports that we watched. Finally, the animatic also showed us the difficulty of shooting in low key lighting as it obscured several shot details, having talked to the media technician we decided it would be better to shoot in normal lighting and then dim the shots when editing.